I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1]
Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have the ability to trade N rare items for another rare item then you quite surely may obtain any cosmetic item you want for a much lower investment (less boxes to open). The 'grey market' will adapt to this new value.
That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
[1] EDIT: and probably a preemptive protection for any future legal threat (as some countries tend to prohibit money gambling in games)
I waded through some Tik Tok comment threads on this change and it was so eye-opening: there are a shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items, thinking it was a retirement portfolio. I fear the crypto era has lead to even further diminished financial literacy at large… Blessed be compound interest and financial regulation.
It's been years now, but I used to be involved in the trading market for Team Fortress 2. There were people who did TF2 trading as a full-time job, exploiting arbitrage between markets and holding items that were expected to increase in value (and sometimes using bots to farm items).
The Mann vs. Machine update in 2012 added a new game mode that would give players loot as a reward for completing missions. Players who didn't care about the trading market (i.e. the vast majority) would look up trading sites after a gaming session to offload their stuff fast without caring much about the value. People who described themselves as "quickbuyers" would aim for the people who wanted quick and simple transactions and then sell the item elsewhere for a markup. I did this for a while and averaged $5-10 of profit per day, usually 20-30 cents per transaction. Someone treating it as a full-time job could probably have made a lot more, like $20+ per day.
That was pretty good money if you a) were a kid with no living expenses, or b) lived in a developing country where the money went farther. I was in group A. Any time I wanted to buy a Steam game, I'd put up my quickbuyer listing on the trading sites and save up the money. But I suspected at the time that most people in the scene were in group B. If I were Valve I'd struggle to pull the trigger on a major change to the in-game economy knowing that it would affect the livelihood of a nontrivial number of people in countries like Venezuela, and maybe that's the reason they seem to have hesitated for so long.
> shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items
If you meant children, with access to parents credit cards, who are addicted to gambling, you’d be more accurate. Children gambling is a huge problem in CS, which created this economy. The players know it, the influencers know it, Valve knows it and pretty much anyone who’s played CS in the recent years knows it. This implosion does nothing more than reset the system for Valve so that they can continue to make money.
How much of the CS player base is actually kids? Maybe wrongly, my view of CS is that it's a legacy game with an audience in their 30s or 40s. And that kids are mostly gambling with roblox or fornite.
CS2 is very much alive. If you look at the pro scene, most players are in the 19-25 range (some outliers are older and younger) which makes sense since it’s much easier to become a pro after 18 than before. But that also implies a healthy pipeline of young players. Obviously the exact breakdown is difficult to estimate, but I’d be inclined to think fewer people in 30s and 40s would have time for CS than in their teens and 20s. I could be wrong.
From mid-2018, CS2 has trended upward at +150,000 players/year. Starting at 500-600,000 that lasted from ~2015 to 2018 with mostly flat rate, after Covid, CS2 has been linearly upward pretty much constantly. The 24hr peak recently was 1,550,265 logged in.
One week variance is maybe ~700,000 during low timeframes, and 1,500,000 during peak hours pretty much every single day. Tends to peak yearly in May, with low tides in May and Nov-Dec usually, although last Dec was relatively up. 2020 and 2023 were both large years, 2025's looking similar.
On the player age question, the best data I was able to find on a quick search was https://www.hltv.org/
Total search over the full range returns 955 entries. Breakdowns by age look like its a pretty heavily 19-24 playerbase. 25-30's also pretty significant. Almost 77% of the player base between them.
On the other hand I am not sure that most people would be playing the same game for 20+ years - I played CS religiously during my school years, but at some point, even if you keep playing games, you just want something else
It's hilarious to US CS items/weapons as a retirement portfolio when you could get pretty damn good and government protected monopoly by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up. These are now being used by actual retirement funds.
Trump banned bump stocks because he thought they were too close to machine guns.
Ron Paul and maybe Massie are about the only politicians of my lifetime that held any real power that I can think of that would even entertain deregulating machine guns.
Incidentally, the longer forced reset triggers stay legal, the more real machines will have their value growth slow and, almost certainly, eventually tumble. The only reason this hasn't happened yet is because most people aren't yet familiar with them and many of the people who are just kind of assume that once they really go mainstream the government will put a stop to it, meaning "real" machine guns maintain their special status and therefore their special price. If FRTs stay legal for a long time and survive public scrutiny, then confidence in their future will grow and they will then eat much of the market demand for machine guns.
Of course, some machine guns would always remain valuable for their desirability as antiques, as long as people remain interested in them. That presumption of future demand for your collection might be a relatively safe bet for cool old guns in America, but it's still a bet.
They could likely get away with banning the FRT and bump stock through amending the definition of the machine gun in congress, just not the executive branch.
The ruling on those had nothing to do with overruling any part of the NFA. Only correctly identifying that FRT and bump stocks do not shoot automatically more than one shot by a single function of the trigger, which is what congress said would be the things allowed to be called machine guns.
> NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never.
2 things make me question this. Never is a long time. People who claim to know the indefinite future, generally don't. These things being understood, forgive me if I don't take your word for it. Nobody should.
Most American conservatives and Trumpists believe most if not all of those things from my experience, and a lot of what's on that site now reflects official American government policy. The only surprise I see there is at least implied pro-Ukraine sentiment.
Having it all laid out together like that makes it obvious how inconsistent it all is. The mental gymnastics to actually believe all that stuff must be incredible. I read the other day about a theory on to obviously false beliefs as a form of in-group signaling and I can't read this collection any other way.
I would sleep perfectly soundly if it relied on politicians not wanting the plebs they subjugate to have easier access to machine guns, which is what keeps their value up.
As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated.
The risk is arguably lower than many single stocks, many of which are bought in retirement portfolio.
NFA firearms have an artificially high value because of the exact set of legal restrictions that the government has put in place: loose enough to not crater legal demand, yet tight enough to restrict legal supply. This market is tied to within US borders.
The government can destroy the assumptions behind this market with a stroke of the pen.
The government can destroy the assumptions on which many businesses are built, that are held as stocks in an investment portfolio. Move the goalposts to relation to international markets, and I will likely find how it applies to some other asset commonly found in investment portfolios, like perhaps the current values of some tax preparation companies.
Your original assertion was "...by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up"
Later you said lower risk than many individual stocks. Maybe, maybe not depending on how we define things. But I do think it's quite possible for the price to go down.
I think you may have to check the text again? The 5th amendment says you get due process, and requires compensation if something is taken for “public use”.
Passing a law which you can challenge in court that says “machine guns are illegal now, turn them in so we can melt them down for scrap” is not public use.
You can pretty clearly see this isn’t the case. Prior to the reversal of the bump stock ban, owners of bump stocks were required to surrender or destroy them.
That's because the state argued they were unregistered machine guns, thus never legally held property. It is not at all comparable to legal, stamped machine guns then being made illegal.
The EO couldn't have forced an uncompensated surrender of a registered bump stock, were it one existed before the Hughes Amendment.
The case law I’m seeing does not seem to provide that level of certainty.
There’s plenty of flexibility in the case law for what counts as “public use”, but nearly all of it is about individual cases where the government takes a specific person’s specific property, or damages it in some way. There doesn’t appear to be much case law at all for the guardrails if the government declares an object to be illegal to possess writ large for safety purposes and requires owners to destroy or surrender those objects.
I’m not saying there’s no path where the courts would require compensation, but for the level of certainty you’re claiming, I’d expect there to be a more clear line you can draw to existing cases.
It's wild to claim with certainty "clearly see that's not the case" then just claim you're just uncertain here.
My initial claim in any case was that the constitution requires the compensation, not that there is 0% chance the government would violate the constitution.
I’m saying: I am certain the constitution does not guarantee payment in this situation. I am not certain a court couldn’t find a way to connect the takings clause and expand current case law to apply to a case like you’re describing in the future.
None of the above has anything to do with the government violating the constitution.
I mean, I think they’ve proven over the last century that the single thing they’re good at is protecting the regular payment of dividends (and of course buybacks more recently)… One might not be entirely mistaken to compare expecting much more than that from the modern state to expecting Valve to protect your skin investments.
I have had friends in the 90s and 00s "invest" in Beanie Babies and Legos and make a ton of money... for a while... and then get wiped out. This is not a new thing.
Yeah, I was trying to think about that when I wrote my comment. I do think there’s at the very least a scale change between the proliferation of unregulated “markets” these days (crypto, cs skins, Pokémon cards, I’m sure others) and the “your beanie babies will be worth a fortune some day” of the past. Perhaps what’s more surprising, though, is how consumer behavior leads these markets to now actually move up and to the right for remarkably long. My sense is you were always in fact delusional to think your beanie babies would hold value, but perhaps people are not entirely crazy looking at the charts of skin prices over X years and expecting it to continue. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the collectors and too charitable to our contemporaries…
That anyone would use a game cosmetic as a retirement portfolio is so unbelievable it has to be trolling, right? I think we might just be witnessing the grief process unfold…
It's not trolling. People living paycheck to paycheck, without much in the way of financial literacy, are big consumers of "made to be collectible" widgets because they're desperate for appreciating assets and don't know how to do better when they struggle to save up a few hundred dollars (in no small part, because of their gambling addictions.)
Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.
It's not always instructive to assume people making seemingly bad financial decisions are acting irrationally.
People living paycheck to paycheck due to child support orders, alimony, or other judgements taking a giant cut of their paycheck are likely buying collectibles instead of on-paper stocks or commodities because they can actually keep those without the state being able to as easily take them.
Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money rather than making some irrational gambling decision.
I know enough people in this kind of circumstance, my own coworkers, who would be in much better financial shape if they stopped gambling. It's very common for them to one day complain that they can't afford lunch, and the next day to come in fuming because they just lost $500 because sportsball team lost.
> Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money"
I know these people personally, they aren't drug dealers.
Regular honest hard working people, who struggle to make ends meet in large part due to gambling addictions and related poor financial decisions. Financially the guys who gamble are even worse off than the alcoholics that don't; there's only so much money you can spend on shit beer a week. The gambling addicts lose far more money far faster. If they were all tossing dice and losing money to each other that wouldn't be nearly so bad, but the way of modern industrial gambling is that it's done through apps and run by far away corporations or even the government, who take their money and basically make it disappear from the community. There's no winning it back, everybody but the casino owners loses in the long run. I used to be libertarian on gambling but not after what I've seen. It hurts not only those who choose to gamble, but also their families and communities.
There's a podcast by 99% Invisible about state lottery. Basically the journalist reporting the story kind of reversed his view on state lotteries over the course of reporting the story. Going from: It's good that we have state lotteries because the money goes back to fund social activities to: It's bad to have lotteries altogether, mainly because of the societal cost of gambling that you've outlined.
Yeah, I mean the stock market is made to either pay passive income if you have millions or to slowly accumulate value through compound interest—expecting anything else is just gambling. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, neither of the first two are particularly helpful even medium term — and it’s not… entirely irrational to go all in on option (C). I’d be really curious to actually know the scale of how many people became millionaires from crypto — I have no intuition for what order of magnitude it is. Regardless, there’s clearly a growing belief that the world is now full of such moonshots.
If you're referring to literal only scratch-offs, maybe. Gambling in general (the point I was addressing using the example), you couldn't be more wrong.
You said "buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets". Of course I was referring to literally that. If you want to say gambling in general, no, not even that is correct. It can only be done where you mostly play against a complice and the house takes a small fixed cut. Nothing to do with lottery shit, that didn't make any sense at all.
The fact lottery tickets were one of the less practical examples does nothing to dispel the point that gambling is a commonly used method of money laundering, which was my point. Your point on one specific form of gambling might be valid but completely unmoving against the principle.
There is no need to have an accomplice, someone could just bet $20 an improbable lottery every time they sell a "hit", eventually they would win big and then have legal taxed income washed and only have to explain how they came up with $20 to end up with thousands in earnings. Who cares if they lose 20,30,50% to the house and taxes when they are happy to pay that to stay out of prison and making high margins.
In fact, watch videos of various change and counterfeit scammers, they quite often use the lottery tickets to launder their proceeds and as part of their crime.[]
There’s a difference between a physical baseball card and a digital weapon skin. One is permanent, the other is only real as long as the game it’s used in is operational. And we know games have a lifespan. It’s not like csgo/2 weapon skins exist on a chain somewhere… That’s the nuance I’m calling out. It’s not correct to equate a weapon skin to a baseball card even though they are a similar type of social phenomenon.
Collectables are a self-explanatory asset class. Children can appreciate and understand the desire for a holographic Charizard card. Series I savings bonds are harder to understand.
I saw an absolutely shocking number of posts from people clearly on minimum wage at best with 20k or so in CS skins, buying loot boxes every week, and no other investments. Obviously no way to verify the accuracy of such statements, but my sense is you would be horrified to know the scale of the market.
I might have shared your surprise a decade ago, but we live in a world where many people use something with even less utility (cryptocurrency) readily in their retirement portfolios.
At least those cosmetic items in video games actually do something.
They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.
Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality".
I understand your analysis, and I certainly failed to mention that point, but making the overall value less attractive to speculators is not evidence of being "rotten to the core".
But is the game rated mature due to violence, or due to gambling? I might be okay with my kid playing a game just because it has violence, but that doesn't mean I'm wanting to sign them up for gambling, but I'm curious if the mature rating even covers that since it's more of a meta-game thing and not actually part of the "game" itself.
I think most countries have much stricter enforcement for gambling age limits, too. If you sell a kid a copy of GTA5 that's their parents problem, but if you allow kids into your casino it's your problem.
The problem is defining what falls under those laws. Companies sell trading card boxes with random contents. McDonalds had its Monopoly game. There are many more examples of things that are gambling with money, accessible to kids and still allowed in most countries.
Typically legal gambling has age limits by law, while the age recommendation for video games is just that, an recommendation. It isn't illegal for a 14 year old to play a game recommended to 18 year olds. Don't know how it works in the US specifically, at least how it works in other places.
I'm guessing the video games industry's attempt at self-regulating with PEGI and similar efforts actually paid off.
I can't speak for your country, but in Australia it's illegal to sell MA15+ rated material to an under 15, and R18+ material to an under 18. CS is MA15+.
Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child.
If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.
I was recently at a lan party for a friend's 40th birthday (something I don't think any of us had done since highschool or so!), most of them are way more into gaming than me and have been consistently since childhood. I was pretty shocked at one point when they went on a loot box binge and I witnessed them drop hundreds on loot boxes etc (I don't know what it's called, the keys or whatever). Definitely didn't seem like the first time. These are adults with children of their own. There is a demographic out there of people I wasn't aware of, not necessarily whales, that have a ton of disposable income for this fluff. And valve has their hooks in them for whatever reason.
I’ve watched grown adults with kids spend hundreds on baseball tickets and beer in one sitting, too. I’m not trying to invalidate your point. But also be careful about making value judgements (“valve has their hooks in them” reads as a negative sentiment to me). People spend money on entertainment and there are worse vices out there.
Grown adults blowing a couple hundred on some fun doesn't really seem that crazy to me. How is that much different than going out to the bar, sticking a benjamin in a slot machine, or buying some collectables?
I didn't downvote you (my account is low reputation) but your argument is weak: that some skins go for absurd amount of money says nothing of the rest of the ecosystem. There can both be children and drug dealers (ab)using the same "gaming" mechanics.
> If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking?
That you used a straw man. The $20k cosmetics weren't mentioned, and even if some buy these, the thing itself can still very well be targeted as gambling towards children.
"Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat."
They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.
But the argument was "they're running an online casino directed at children", the fact that someone buys the result of the gambling for adult money / $20k doesn't mean it's not, and is basically irrelevant to that statement.
They take a 30% cut on Steam, i.e. on most PC games. They are printing money. They have an absurdly high profit-per-employee ratio. That's a failure of capitalism, called rent seeking.
having a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking.
valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
It's not "high", it's extremely high. They just have a few hundred employees while making several millions of profit per employee. More than Apple. They are printing money.
> valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users,
A 30% fee just for hosting the game is not valuable.
> and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
The cost is substantial. It costs the developer 30%. That's a huge chunk of the total revenue. Hosting a game is very cheap, and could probably be done with less than a 3% fee. Often Valve will make more profit from a game than the developer itself. Sometimes the developer will lose money (after subtracting development cost) but Valve will still make a big profit with that game.
Their high profit is indicative of the high level of value they provide. They're far from the only store to buy/sell games in. Steam's users use Steam because they prefer it to the alternatives.
While I can't argue whether 30% is actually fair, I do believe you are disregarding some benefits steam brings which may seem trivial. The hosting of online-games and facilitation of sales is not their only service. One that has traceable value that immediately comes to mind is the illusion of a central authority for achievements.
I have personally purchased many titles a second time to register my feats with steam and anecdotally see similar sentiment among older gamers. Achievements feel worthless in isolation but provide fulfillment when socially recognized. These are sales being manifested solely through Steam's position.
Now, back to whether this social permanence is worth the 30% Steam is extracting, I do have my opinions. Steam is technically "rent-seeking" from a strict economic classification, but is this more-so a case of the lighthouse or the railroad?
its probably low compare what customers and game developers are willing to pay for it.
hosting a game and running a store nowdays is very easy, but still games launch on steam rather than building their own store or using a steam competitor. if the cost was too high, people would not be using the service
> Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players.
This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.
By your definition, any monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". But it isn't. Just because something is useful, doesn't mean it can't be massively overpriced due to competition not working as it should. Proper market competition should ensure that no company can extract huge profit margins for trivial things. Like hosting games.
Epic, Steam's only serious competitor currently aside from maybe GoG, just had a bug in their launcher that had all Fortnite players have to redownload their entire 150~ GB game. The cost of hosting aside, the capabilities of these companies to host their own games pales in comparison to Valve, who hasn't had a single bug in downloading or updating any game in the decade and a half I have used their launcher.
Considering how alternative storefronts can't even get automatic updates to work consistently, the most basic functionality of a games storefront (more important than purchasing even, since if you can't get what you purchased, it's useless), it actually doesn't seem obvious to me that other providers can easily host their own games. Even putting aside everything else Valve uses their cut for (hosting a community forum for every game, hosting a mod DB for every game that wants it, metrics tracking, opt-in soft DRM, providing server hosting, maintaining Proton so your game works on Linux), the cut seems almost reasonable even just for hosting when nobody else is able to do it right.
I use steam to launch the games i get from epic and gog. Epic's launcher is so bad that i use their web store to manage inventory and often can't remember if i own a game on epic unless it's set to launch via steam.
It can be helpful to look at it less in terms of what it costs Valve to run their service and more in terms of what value developers get from Valve for the money.
I'm in the business and I've asked two different heads of large, very well-known AAA studios how they felt about Valve's percentage, and they basically told me the same thing: They had their teams do rigorous analyses of what it would cost them to 'replace' Valve for their games, and concluded it would cost roughly what they were already paying Valve. So they had no incentive to move off the platform. Look at how many publishers have come slinking back to Steam after trying to go solo -- there are good business reasons for that, and it isn't just about the stubborn fact of their huge social graph.
If it costs that much to replace Valve for your game, it's hard to argue that what they're charging isn't fair.
As others have pointed out, Valve does far more than just host. Shipping a multiplayer game and want comprehensive protection from DDoS attacks? Use Valve's datagram network for no additional fee. Don't want to host your own lobby servers? Use Valve's for no additional fee, they'll accommodate hundreds of thousands of players with no complaints. Want to sell your game in a zillion countries? Valve's got you, easy peasy. And discovery is a thing -- Valve sells a whooole lot of games just by putting them in the carousel in front of players. This is huge, huge value.
And as a player, I'm actually really happy, super happy, did I mention how incredibly happy I am with what they're doing with some of their cut: They saved gaming on Linux -- it's often better than Windows -- and I love my SteamDeck. So that cut is benefiting me directly as a consumer because they're spending it on initiatives I'm really passionate about.
Valve delivers a ton of value for the cost. If someone wants to try to do better, Valve's not stopping them, but I can tell you that as a player and a gamedev, none of the other options are remotely enticing to me. In my view, that's not Valve's problem to solve by cratering their own revenue.
> Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.
Steam does far more than just host, and everyone who uses it knows this, so it's clear that you either have no idea what Steam does (in which case you should not be commenting) or you're actively lying about it.
Steam provides payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.
> By your definition, any Monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism".
This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions.
And yes, there is competition - the fact that you don't know this is yet another indicator that you're totally ignorant of anything relevant to the conversation. There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work.
Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
> Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
They seem to live in this bubble where steam is extremely bad or something.
Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
I think valve is still decent but I prefer Gog-games more if I can be honest, valve has drm but I appreciate their customer service from what I know and the amount of good games it produced like portal and the steam marketplace is still a very nice thing imo.
I don't think steam is rent-seeking at all and I agree with your statement on it.
Now I still believe that CS-GO's lootboxes are still an issue tho, maybe I am not understanding the significance of change so much
Steam still does nothing to prevent gambling for children and people selling the skins on the other websites, I am not understanding how this change changes that, I read some other comment in here which said that you can have contracts which convert the rare to extremely rare Only in steam marketplace so maybe they stopped the other shady websites/the youtubers they sponsor by limiting their influence....
I don't understand :/ I still feel like Steam had turned a blind eye to child gambling for a long time and Coffeezilla had made a video about it which I can refer to.
> There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work.
The same is true for linux/Windows as well. You could say that windows has the market at work but the point becomes moot.
It isn't as if there aren't better options (GOG) but that its rather good enough
Like I said nothing is as good or as bad as it seems, my opinion on steam is barely good enough partially because of its previous responses on turning a blind eye to the whole situation but maybe this is changing with this thing they did right now but I am still not sure how.
Yes, of course, I'm not claiming that Steam is some utopic paradise or that GabeN is a saint or anything. Steam has problems too - most notably the huge skins gambling issue that you mention. I'm just specifically saying that out of all of its problems, "rent-seeking" is definitely not one of them.
> The same is true for linux/Windows as well. You could say that windows has the market at work but the point becomes moot.
Yes, there's additional detail that I didn't add - that, unlike Microsoft, which used (and continues to use) anticompetitive tactics like paying PC manufacturers to include Windows as the default option, Steam didn't do anything anticompetitive to become the most popular - they were just the best - and they haven't done anything to unfairly leverage their dominant market position. That doesn't strike me as a problem - and my point to the GP was specifically that they're the most popular because they're the best, not because they did scummy backroom deals to get there.
I agree that GOG is probably better. But Steam is "good enough", and modulo the gambling problem, isn't really "bad".
Yea I agree rent seeking is definitely not the problem, huge skins gambling is.
> modulo the gambling problem, isn't really "bad".
Can you please explain to me what you mean by this. I feel like valve enabled skins gambling which even underage people could do for a long time, so there is some truth about it and coffeezilla made a video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
I am just saying the ethics of the company isn't perfect when they enabled gambling for a long time, I am not sure if right now it can be fixed or how this steps that they did right now fixes that problem if I am being honest.
Other services do the same for arbitrary online shops, at much lower fees. In fact, Valve likely doesn't even run it's own payment processing, but merely integrates other services.
> cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility
The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game. Yet they charging 30% on hundreds or thousands of AAA games and other games.
> This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions.
You clearly stated that Steam is fine because it is useful. But anything sold by a monopoly can be useful while still being massively overpriced. Which proves that mere usefulness of something doesn't mean the price of it is justified. Which refutes your original usefulness argument.
> And yes, there is competition
Yes, but the fact that there is theoretically competition doesn't mean it is working. Large platforms like Steam benefit from network effects which come from their size alone. People will simply stay at Steam because that's already were their other games are, and because they don't see the massive 30% fee, that Valve is keeping, as some cost they have to pay. Any other platform faces a "chicken and egg" style uphill battle against these effects, even if they charge a substantially lower fee.
> Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying
Rather than hurling insults at me consider the simple question: If Steam was so fairly priced, wasn't charging excessive fees, how can it be that they have an extremely high profit margin? Realistically, that can only be because Valve's revenue from Steam vastly exceeds the costs of running and maintaining it.
> > cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility
> The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game
Then surely Epic, or Microsoft, or Sony could just easily create one. There being literally 0 such services means it's likely a bit more difficult than one AAA game :) So your argument is invalid.
It goes down to 20% when you have enough sales. Still high IMO. Marketplaces like steam, app store, etc, should charge based on services rendered rather than some arbitrary %.
I still prefer steam even if its more expensive than other marketplaces. They provide real value over just distribution, like their return policy.
> Other services do the same for arbitrary online shops, at much lower fees. In fact, Valve likely doesn't even run it's own payment processing, but merely integrates other services.
Irrelevant strawman argument. It doesn't matter that Valve doesn't run its own payment processing - it still provides an easier platform for use than going to Stripe and figuring out how to connect user purchase to game licenses.
> The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game. Yet they charging 30% on hundreds or thousands of AAA games and other games.
OK, so now you've both admitted that you were factually incorrect on your original assertion that the only value that Steam provided was hosting, and you've moved the goalposts from "Steam doesn't do anything except hosting" to "well those features aren't worth the cost", which is completely different.
So, we've completely disproved your original claim that Steam is "rent-seeking", because these features provide immense value to both developers and players.
And, that claim about "The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game"? Completely unfounded. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Multiplayer networking is hard, and you're claiming that ALL of the features that Steam provides are comparable to that of a single AAA game.
Also, funny that you mention "one single AAA game" - whose costs can go into the billions of dollars.
> You clearly stated that Steam is fine because it is useful.
Stop trying to justify your lying about my points, please. Admit that you acted dishonestly out of malice and we can move on to any actual points you might have.
> But anything sold by a monopoly can be useful while still being massively overpriced.
More goalpost-moving (you originally claimed that Steam was both "a failure of capitalism" and "rent-seeking" - these claims are completely different), that turns out to not even be relevant because Steam is a monopoly along no relevant dimension. There is nothing that prevents you from creating both a Steam account and an Epic Games account, or a developer from selling on both Steam and the EA store. You can even install non-Steam games on Valve's own hardware. You even concede that there is competition later in this very comment.
> Which proves that mere usefulness of something doesn't mean the price of it is justified. Which refutes your original usefulness argument.
No, it doesn't, because both your first point has no connection whatsoever to your second, and you neither proved that Steam was overpriced, nor actually refuted any of my points as stated in my comments - merely twisted and lied about them. Where do I say "useful" in my original comment?
> Large platforms like Steam benefit from network effects which come from their size alone. People will simply stay at Steam because that's already were their other games are, and because they don't see the massive 30% fee, that Valve is keeping, as some cost they have to pay. Any other platform faces a "chicken and egg" style uphill battle against these effects, even if they charge a substantially lower fee.
This is fallacious. There is no "stay at Steam" - as previously stated, there's zero mutual exclusion between Steam and other platforms on either the dev or the player side. And there's no "chicken and egg" uphill battle either, because Steam accounts don't cost money, and so unlike trying to start a new paid streaming platform where you can't attract users because there's no content, and you can't sign content deals because there's no users. This is an inaccurate, irrelevant, and dishonest analogy.
> Rather than hurling insults at me
You literally lied about my points. That's not an insult - that's a fact. Don't lie if you don't want someone to correctly describe when you're lying.
> consider the simple question: If Steam was so fairly priced, wasn't charging excessive fees, how can it be that they have an extremely high profit margin?
That's a twisted definition of "excessive". Your "excessive" is "Valve charges more than it costs them to provide services". Very few people in the real world (which includes me, most HN users, and most people who actually play games, given that you probably don't) actually operate on that model, and instead consider "excessive" to be either relative to value delivered to them, or to comparable alternatives. Almost nobody, when making a value decision about whether or not to buy a new phone consider the profit margins to the phone manufacturers - they only care about the value delivered to them, which is as it should be, because...
> Realistically, that can only be because Valve's revenue from Steam vastly exceeds the costs of running and maintaining it.
Valve does not have an obligation to price their services at cost, or close to cost. They're entirely entitled to price their services at the amount of value delivered to their customers, without any judgement whatsoever.
So, to summarize - we've objectively refuted your claims that Steam is "rent-seeking", pointed out several more dishonest rhetorical tricks and redefinitions of common words that you've used, including revealing that your claims of "Valve bad" are merely personal indignation that Valve makes more money than you think that they should, and confirmed that yes, you did lie about my earlier points.
IMO the phrase "legitimate investment" should be reserved for situations where you spend money something (e.g. kitchen equipment) that allows you to create new real-world value (e.g. food) which you can hopefully sell for a profit (it's still a legitimate investment if that fails). It should not be used for Ponzi schemes, gambling, outright fraud, or anything of the sort. Buying something and then hoping its price goes up before you sell it should not be called investing, but gambling - unless it fits in the category I just described.
People find value in acquiring things they want. For example if someone wants to have a one letter username on X, there is value for there to be willing to sell one.
Damn you’re trying to tell me that people will abandon all morality just to make billions of dollars? Who would of thought that something like that could be possible.
I honestly don't understand the logic behind policies like this. As a kid, my friends and I loved to buy Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a few years, and while I think most adults thought it was pretty silly, I don't recall anyone ever claiming that this was somehow equivalent to gambling for children despite it basically the same mechanism as loot boxes; most booster packs were essentially not worth the value once opened because with the exception of a few specific rare cards in each set, the cards were not very valuable even to a collector or player of the game.
I could see an argument that there's an issue with closed ecosystems where value of an item can be changed after someone has obtained it due to control by a centralized provider, but that's completely different concern to the idea of gambling being harmful.
As a kid I viewed MtG, baseball cards, etc as gambling and often heard them referred to as such.
The loot box issue is in part how easy it is to take this stuff to excess. My 8 year old niece racked up ~1,500$ worth of charges in a game when AT&T messed up permissions after a cellphone upgrade. It’s shockingly easy for people to blow arbitrary money on this stuff as the industry is optimized to be predatory as whales make up the bulk of profits.
So I suspect physical stores being really skeptical if an 8 year old showed up to buy a grand of Pokémon cards likely tampered the backlash.
It absolutely was and is gambling, and plenty of people complain about it. I've always thought it was disgusting to make a living off of pay-to-play games targeted at children. Morally somewhere around the level of being a pimp.
I don't even like it when targeted at adults, but we allow adults to do far worse when it comes to gambling. A lot of our hollow economies depend on it. But you really have to be a moral sewer to pay your rent from kids hoping to open the right bag to hopefully energize their often very narrow, often very autistic social lives. At best you're a carnie.
Yes, Valve controls supply. That strengthens my point.
Market makers do not control the supply of goods. They provide resting liquidity for pre-existing goods.
Similarly, market makers do not get to establish rules of the of their own "reality". Market makers are participants in a venue. It is the venue/exchange that sets the rules.
User Bengalilol seems to have inferred that because Valve made the venue, he can refer to them as the "market maker". This is not correct. Words have meaning. The meaning of market-maker is well-established in the context of exchanges. Market maker is incorrect terminology for Valve’s role.
Trades happening off market is also due to valve not having a way to cash out. If you sell your $20,000 item on the steam marketplace that's a lot of games you can buy, but they won't send you money.
FWIW, people were purchasing Steam Decks with the "Steam Money", then reselling the console for cash.
Its still not "cashing out", but I'm sure some made some decent money. I would assume you could sell game keys to those less-than-reputable sites as well? Dunno
Agreed overall though, these are just extensions of "happening off-market"
No one claimed that. The point was that Valve controls the API and can cut access to said API to the gambling sites. This is not like sports betting, where the gambling sites don't need any integration with the actual sport : if Valve wants, they can seriously affect the abity of the sites to function.
Yes, they provide the API that those sites need to function. That doesn't mean the API is exclusively for those sites. Just that Valve is the one enabling those sites, they're not completely independent.
Nonsense argument. They provide an api that players use, that can also be used by boys to perform trades. Maybe the problem you have with this is that they can do trades.
I really don't get what you're confused about. Yes, the existence of the API is good and useful. What Valve should do, if they really cared about stopping CS or TF2 gambling, is to limit access to this API for the gambling sites. The API should ONLY be accessible to individual players. That means IP restrictions, client agent sniffing, bot behavior analysis, etc - not trivial, and not foolproof, but also not exactly rocket science.
It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.
Read up on the story, look at the influencers promoting it and the ecosystem that grew around it. Valve is willfully running a casino for underage and have bypassed local laws that protect against this using technicalities. It's frightening.
The Armory and the new terminal shows they are moving way from loot boxes into a kind of "proof of work" economy, in which price is driven up by grinding and limited availability.
My personal theory is that it's related to their planned launch of their new VR headset soon, and want people to be able to buy it using the Steam Store - so deflating the market means there's reduced buying power on the market, reducing ways in which people can get money 'out' of Steam by buying hardware with Steam-bux and selling for real currency.
> That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
It was a multi-billion dollar market, which blew my mind. Good on valve for bursting the bubble, but it sounds like it should have happened much sooner.
> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
All the change valve did was make 5 rare items to give a chance/give a extremely rare item
Earlier, that wasn't the case and were locked behind only lootboxes with extremly rare chances i guess.
So this mechanic was already there from 1000 uncommon -> 10 common -> 1(mythic?) -> rare but now it spread to even extremely rare.
The price drop happened because the extremely rare aren't as rare because now it increased the supply as more people created their rares into extremely rares and sold it on the market and more supply, less price, thus the price wipe out and the loss.
Also skins are just cosmetics, they have no in game advantage
I just searched and you get some skin when you level up but the point I am trying to tell you is that if someone actually plays the game for a long time, they get involved in its community and naturally people would flex their skin etc and they would want to get skins to feel cool as well
So its more like people playing -> wants skin / creates money. Instead of wanting money -> people playing games
But maybe someone could be playing/grinding for the skins but I genuinely don't think this is why steam did it.
Steam did it to show the regulatory power they have in game that they can wipe billions. They are creating their in game store which takes prices from online marketplace so they might tighten the regulations on it in such a way that instead of going to random websites or other parties, steam / valve will try to instead be the middleman and try to capture even more %'s of the trade
Another neat point is that if someone wants a skin in the community, they basically got cheaper now 30-40% so it becomes more affordable imo for the people playing but still
I think valve wouldn't have predicted the losses to be of billions of dollar in terms of wipeout since they had mentioned it as a small change and it wasn't even their twitter update note iirc
I think that a lot of people especially chinese people invested into it and it was a bubble in formation and then people got panicked after this news and the panic made other people panic and thus the insane billions of $ of losses.
This doesn't explain though "why now?". All of these reasons would make sense, but they've been in legal disputes before in the 13 years since the game came out. And why would they suddenly care about players' frustration? The skins economy isn't wildly different now than previously.
Well, I don't know their motives, but if we were talking just about legal issues, at least in the EU we're seeing stricter laws about loot boxes this year (and I'm all in about that).
Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have the ability to trade N rare items for another rare item then you quite surely may obtain any cosmetic item you want for a much lower investment (less boxes to open). The 'grey market' will adapt to this new value.
That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
[1] EDIT: and probably a preemptive protection for any future legal threat (as some countries tend to prohibit money gambling in games)